Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

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Tag: Pakistan

As the New York Timesreports, the Stimson Center today released a report warning that “the Obama administration’s embrace of targeted killings using armed drones risks putting the United States on a ‘slippery slope’ into perpetual war.” The Washington Post, the Guardian and Vox all lead their articles on the report with that warning.

The slippery slope point probably isn’t new to most readers. But it’s worth focusing on here, both because the argument is often misstated or misunderstood, and because, in this case, I helped make it. The report’s task force, co-chaired by retired General John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Rosa Brooks of Georgetown Law, included working groups. I was on one that considered, among other things, what danger drones create for U.S. foreign policy. The report largely reflects those we identified: the erosion of sovereignty, blowback from those in targeted countries, drone strikes’ tendency to undermine democratic oversight, and the slippery slope problem.

The report puts those concerns in context. It points out that: drones can serve wise or dumb policies; that most drones are for surveillance or other non-strike uses; and that it is drone strikes that occur off declared battlefields that have generated the most controversy. The report notes that past military innovations, like cruise missiles, raised similar concerns by making waging war easier.

The report rejects several common complaints about drones. It denies that they create a reckless, “playstation mentality” among pilots. It explains that drones are not more prone than other weapons cause civilian casualties.

Having delimited the circumstances where drones raise concerns, the report goes into considerable causal detail, at least compared to most reports of this kind, about what the trouble is. The blowback, oversight, and sovereignty problems are relatively easy to understand, in theory. The tricky part is measuring the harm.

News out of U.S. “ally“ Pakistan appears promising for its fragile democracy, but may actually signal a continuation of that country’s destructive political pattern. For the past two days, Sufi cleric Tahir-ul Qadri has led protests in Islamabad calling for a caretaker administration to take over for the ruling coalition, a swap he claims will help to ensure that upcoming parliamentary elections (yet to be scheduled) remain honest. Amid those protests, Pakistan’s Supreme Court issued an arrest order for Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, who as minister for water and power allegedly received illegal kickbacks.

A colleague asked me: “What does this mean for Pakistani democracy?” To which I replied, “When did it ever exist?”

On that note, another prominent figure in this unfolding drama who once supported the maintenance of dictatorial authority is none other than Pakistan Supreme Court Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. In February 2000, after Musharraf overthrew democratically elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a bloodless coup in 1999, Chaudhry, then chief justice of the Balochistan Supreme Court, swore an oath of office under Musharraf to become a judge on Pakistan’s Supreme Court. As Pakistan analyst Seth Oldmixon points out, the court, in its own words, “validated the extra-constitutional step on the touchstone of the doctrine of state necessity and the principle of salus populi suprema lex” (Let the good of the people be the supreme law).

Spontaneous bouts of pro-democracy protests are promising, but sadly it appears that no one is innocent in this confusing political spectacle. Democracy or no democracy, though, Islamabad’s relations with Washington will likely continue its transactional nature, with a heavy and unpredictable mixture of antagonism and cooperation.

Last year, in a piece for AOL News titled “Will Egypt Follow Pakistan’s Troubled Path?” I warned that U.S. policymakers must be careful of whatever government follows ousted Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak by not repeating the mistake of giving lavish material support to a distasteful regime, as America did with Pakistan’s General-President, Pervez Musharraf. I had argued that the ample generosity of American taxpayers—in the form of lavish military and economic aid—to a foreign dictator’s all-powerful military hardly produces the desired outcomes, and results in a military that is further entrenched and able to ignore the popular demands of its people.

Sadly, that scenario is playing out in Egypt. An editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal picks up on my point from last year, stating, “the result may be a state that is less an Islamist-tinged democracy a la Turkey and more a military-Islamist condominium akin to unstable Pakistan.”

Indeed. The political turmoil in Egypt took yet another disappointing turn yesterday when its Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, decreed that the military will assume responsibility for security during the country’s constitutional referendum, to take place on December 15. Amid protests against the referendum on a constitution hurried through an Islamist-dominated assembly, Morsi made his decrees immune from judicial review and gave the military the power to arrest civilians. As the Journal explains, the Egyptian military is the most powerful institution in the country and has its own reasons—such as maintaining de facto control over much of the economy—for keeping the status quo.

As for America’s role in this unfolding controversy, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius writes today:

The [Obama] administration’s rejoinder is that this isn’t about America. Egyptians and other Arabs are writing their history now, and they will have to live with the consequences…[B]ut it’s crazy for Washington to appear to take sides against those who want a liberal, tolerant Egypt and for those who favor sharia. Somehow, that’s where the administration has ended up.

Oddly enough, as Ignatius suggests, claiming that “this isn’t about America” is disingenuous. After all, America’s Egypt policy continues to tip the scale on both sides: it backs Egypt’s liberal protesters and the authoritarian government that oppresses them. The world is standing witness to a head-on collision between the Bush freedom agenda and the Cold War relic of U.S. grand strategy in the Middle East, as foreign policy planners in Washington pay lip service to principles of self-determination and political emancipation while simultaneously assisting authoritarian leaders who suppress the popular demands of their people.

In the end, while what is happening in Egypt is unfortunate, come what may. The best way to discredit Islamists is to let their record speak for itself. Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood President should be allowed to fail on his own terms. The Egyptian people voted to bring Islamists to power and it was their prerogative to do so. If Washington truly wants to leave Cairo’s future “to the Egyptian people,” then it should do so by phasing out aid to Egypt completely.

To contain mass protests in Pakistan over a now infamous anti-Islamic film, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appear in a $70,000, U.S.-funded ad on Pakistani television denouncing the film and saying America “respects all faiths.”

This joint White House-State Department effort seems terribly misguided, as I would wager that Pakistanis are angrier with Washington dropping bombs on their domes—both cranial and architectural. But what makes this public relations endeavor particularly ill conceived is that, on a basic level, the U.S. Government should be taking this opportunity to promote one of its core foundational principles: the free speech of private citizens.

The ad does not do that. It instead emphasizes America’s tolerance for religious freedom without reference to other fundamental rights. I recognize that Obama and Clinton not only want to stop the anti-American protests, but also challenge the misconception that private and public speech in America are essentially one and the same. But when demonstrators in Peshawar are burning movie theaters and setting fire to posters of female movie stars, our leaders convey the impression that they are kowtowing to radicals. (It should be noted that the savagery perpetrated by radicals in the Muslim world disgusts many moderate Muslims.)

It is bad enough that Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has asked its American counterpart to have the anti-Islamic film removed from YouTube. It would be worse if Washington fulfilled that expectation by obliging. As writer Salman Rushdie has said of the protests more generally, free speech is at risk because “religious extremists of all stripes” attack people who criticize beliefs.

Americans live under a different set of laws and customs and should never be scared into bending to extremists. And, however offensive the film mocking Mohammed was, there is no excuse for the violent behavior on display.

Based on a broad theory of executive power, President Obama, and possibly his successor, has the authority to target people for death—including American citizens—without a semblance of transparency, accountability, or congressional consent. Since 9/11, officials and analysts have touted drone strikes as the most effective weapon against al Qaeda and its affiliates. Drones have become a tool of war without the need to declare one. The latest front is Yemen, where a dramatic escalation of drone strikes could be enlisting as many militants as they execute.

“In Yemen, U.S. airstrikes breed anger, and sympathy for al-Qaeda,” a headline blared in last week’s Washington Post. The evidence of radicalization comes from more than 20 interviews with tribal leaders, victims’ relatives, human rights activists, and officials from southern Yemen, an area where U.S. drone strikes have targeted suspected militants affiliated with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The escalating campaign of drone strikes kills civilians along with alleged militants. Tribal leaders and Yemeni officials say these strikes have angered tribesmen who could be helping to prevent AQAP from growing more powerful.

According to the Post, in 2009, U.S. officials claimed that AQAP had nearly 300 core members. Yemeni officials and tribal leaders say that number has grown to 700 or more, with hundreds of tribesmen joining its ranks to fight the U.S.-backed Yemeni government. “That’s not the direction in which the drone strikes were supposed to move the numbers,” wrote the Atlantic’s Robert Wright.

As the majority of U.S. missile assaults shift from Pakistan to Yemen—allowing foreign policy planners to wage undeclared wars on multiple fronts—Americans should pay close attention to a few important and complicating factors that make the conflict in Yemen unique. First, the self-proclaimed Marxist state of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) only merged with its northern neighbor, the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR), in 1990. In 1994, the two countries fought a bloody civil war that did not result in a smooth reunification. The International Crisis Group’s “Breaking Point? Yemen’s Southern Question” summarizes competing North-South narratives:

Under one version, the war laid to rest the notion of separation and solidified national unity. According to the other, the war laid to rest the notion of unity and ushered in a period of Northern occupation of the South.

Media reports asserting that AQAP is taking advantage of the South’s hunger for independence should be understood in the context of this Northern-Southern divide. Rather than encourage the Yemeni government to respond to southern demands for greater local autonomy, Washington’s tactics are helping the U.S.-backed Yemeni government repress Southern separatists. Indeed, many residents in Abyan, in southern Yemen, claim that the Yemeni government intentionally ceded territory to domestic enemies in order to frighten the West into ensuring more support against the indigenous uprising.

These developments are troubling, as the escalation of drone strikes could be creating the self-fulfilling prophecy of helping alleged AQAP-linked militants gain ground and increasing local sympathy for their cause. As Ben Friedman wrote recently, the misperception that comes with conflating AQAP with the broaderinsurgency is that it “invites a broad U.S. campaign against Yemen’s southern Islamists, which could heighten their enthusiasm for attacking Americans, creating the menace we feared.” That assessment echoes the sentiment of The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill, who has done intrepid reporting in Yemen. He recently said the campaign being conducted “is going to make it more likely that Yemen becomes a safe haven for those kinds of [terrorist] groups.”

The Oval Office seems to be giving this issue of sympathy short shrift. President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, has publicly argued that the precision of drone strikes limits civilian casualties. However, the New York Times revealed last week that the president and his underlings resort to dubious accounting tricks to low-ball the estimate of civilian deaths, counting “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants” while the Department of Defense even targets suspects in Yemen “whose names they do not know.” The Times’ article recounts one of the administration’s very first strikes in Yemen:

It killed not only its intended target, but also two neighboring families, and left behind a trail of cluster bombs that subsequently killed more innocents. It was hardly the kind of precise operation that Mr. Obama favored. Videos of children’s bodies and angry tribesmen holding up American missile parts flooded You Tube, fueling a ferocious backlash that Yemeni officials said bolstered Al Qaeda.

As foreign policy planners in Washington deepen our military involvement in Yemen, the American people—rather than focusing on the number of senior al Qaeda killed—should be asking whether we’re killing more alleged militants than our tactics help to recruit.

Yet again, U.S.-Pakistan relations have hit a new low. Days after a deal to reopen NATO supply routes into Afghanistan fell through, and two back-to-back U.S. drone strikes rocked northwest Pakistan in a 24-hour period, tensions flared again after a tribal court sentenced Dr. Shakil Afridi—a Pakistani citizen who helped the United States track-down Osama bin Laden with a fake vaccination program—to 33 years in prison.

Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill were appalled, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the move “unjust and unwarranted.” Apparently, U.S. officials and lawmakers are surprised that the chasm separating Washington and Islamabad is growing wider after years of papering over their differences.

Yesterday, in response to Dr. Afridi’s 33-year sentence under the Frontier Crimes Regulation, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to cut aid to Pakistan by a symbolic $33 million. That’s not enough—it represents just 58% of the amount the president requested for Pakistan. Washington should go further and phase out assistance entirely.

Today in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, my coauthor Aimen Khan and I argue that ending aid to Pakistan is the right course for both countries:

The U.S. must carefully calibrate a policy with Pakistan that continues diplomatic relations absent large sums of aid. While cutting aid to Pakistan might be temporarily destabilizing, Pakistan’s support for militant Islamists is arguably more harmful to regional stability. Moreover, while emergency-type humanitarian aid can be beneficial to the Pakistani people, economic development aid intended to promote growth has been detrimental, allowing Islamabad to avoid confronting its rampant corruption and budgetary problems with the necessary urgency.

As is common with U.S. military and foreign aid to unstable governments, it typically serves to entrench the prerogatives of military and civilian elites. Quite perversely, in return for the tens of billions of dollars that American taxpayers forked over to Islamabad, many in Pakistan have come to blame Washington for their deteriorating situation. Even well-intentioned assistance under the much-lauded Kerry-Lugar aid package was viewed within Pakistan as an infringement on sovereignty, mainly because it came with intrusive strings attached. Furthermore, U.S. aid and arm-twisting have failed to pressure or persuade Pakistan to go after militants we deem to be a threat to our interests, including the Afghan/Quetta Shura/Karachi Taliban, Hekmatyar, and the Haqqanis.

From the 30,000-foot view, from Islamabad to New Delhi, it appears that Washington is slowly making a long-term pivot in South Asia. But as this author argued years ago, reconciling this pivot in the context of Afghanistan has been nothing short of a failure. The United States and Pakistan do not trust one another, NATO slouches toward an exit, and Pakistan has become more radicalized, destabilized, and encircled by India and militants.

The killing of Osama bin Laden marked a significant achievement in America’s long war against al Qaeda. Yet, following last year’s Navy SEAL raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, it became clear that disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda did not require the occupation of distant lands. Indeed, even in the absence of the terrorist leader’s death, the sad and simple truth was that the protracted wars of occupation waged in 9/11’s name were an enormous drain on American taxpayers and counterproductive to the goal of stopping terrorism.

Certainly, bin Laden’s killing does not mean the end of al Qaeda, but it does provide another reason to bring our ongoing sacrifice in blood and treasure in Afghanistan to a swift end. Moreover, Americans should be circumspect about planners in Washington expanding the War on Terror to distant enemies in Pakistan, Yemen, the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere. Al Qaeda and its associates have always been manageable security problems, not existential threats to America that require endless war by remote control.

The lesson of 9/11 and its Saudi terrorist financier is that would-be terrorists have reduced their dependence on specific base camps and physical havens. They can plan, organize, and train from virtually anywhere in the world, from Kandahar and Hamburg to Malaysia and Los Angeles. Indeed, the very al Qaeda terrorists responsible for 9/11 not only found sanctuary in poverty-stricken Afghanistan, but also in politically free and economically prosperous countries like Germany, Spain, and the United States. In this respect, policymakers and prominent opinion leaders must stop conflating the punishment of al Qaeda with the creation of stable societies, particularly when propping up corrupt and illegitimate foreign governments and waging counterinsurgency campaigns distracts from the conceptually simpler task of targeted counterterrorism measures to find and eliminate terrorist threats.